Fundamentalism Vs. Wonder

I am accustomed to defending conservative Protestants (Evangelicals, Reformed, fundamentalists, and so forth) because I know many of them, and I know they get a raw deal from many in our secular liberal media culture. It’s not because I agree with them on everything, of course, but because I know that they are more complicated than many of their critics think — and often a lot more big-hearted. Yet it is also true that I have no deep experience with the harsher side of this culture. Almost all of my experience with these Protestant co-religionists has been pleasant, grace-filled, and upbuilding. I know this isn’t the whole truth. There is no subculture, religious or secular, that doesn’t have its nasty extremes. My point is that it’s often the case when I see conservative Protestants talked about in the media, I see a caricature that I know to be untrue, and I naturally want to push back against that. This is why I felt obliged recently to defend Marco Rubio and the Young Earth Creationist crowd, even though I believe they are quite wrong on the science, and on what ought to be taught in schools.

I should say that I didn’t grow up within a culture that valued this rigid, hard-edged expression of Christianity, so I am admittedly insensitive to the unpleasant realities within certain corners of conservative Protestantism. My wife did grow up more or less in that world, and has a much more jaundiced view of it. She remains conservative in her Christianity, but gets emotional when she talks about the fear (her word) that comes with fundamentalism and the more rigorous forms of Evangelicalism. I hear her talk about some of the things she heard and did in various church and parachurch organizations as a kid, and it floors me. Somebody of my background only really sees the good side of all that, not because that’s the only thing I want to see, but because I have never traveled in those circles (the closest I came was a couple of years in my adolescence, but that involved only reading books), so my experience with those folks has truly only been good.

I say all this as prelude to my telling you about something that happened yesterday that really bothers me. I’m not going to name names, because I don’t want to stir this particular pot any more than it has been stirred. Let’s just say that I read a book by an Evangelical author with whose work I was unfamiliar. She writes about her experience of God in a sacramental way — that is, how her experience of the beauty of creation awakened something in her, and brought her closer to God through her awareness of His presence in the natural world, and in the world of things His people have made to His glory. It’s the kind of thing that’s an ordinary part of Catholic and Orthodox theology and spirituality, and I thought she wrote beautifully about this awakening.

When I googled around trying to find out more about this writer, I was shocked — honestly shocked — to find so many articulate, educated Protestant pastors and writer cutting loose on her as if she were some sort of New Age crystal guru. It was very, very harsh stuff. Of course one doesn’t expect fundamentalists and other very conservative Protestants to agree with traditional sacramental theology, and I certainly see grounds for criticism of this writer’s book, at least from a conservative Protestant perspective. What shook me up was the vehemence of the theological attacks on this writer, and the absolute — absolute! — insistence that the kinds of things she identifies smack of “mysticism,” and are the first step to becoming a New Ager.

They are right: this writer does come from a mystical standpoint, but in that she is well within the tradition of the Christian church. The criticism of her work seemed to come from writers whose theology seemed to make no space for any kind of mystery, and certainly not for emotion. It was dry and syllogistic, and to this outsider, came across as extremely suspicious of joy. I thought of the film Breaking The Waves, and how the hardcore Scots Calvinist community in that film could not handle any expression of spirituality outside of its strict conceptual confines. One of the critics of this writer spited her for discerning something holy in an old Catholic cathedral, given how “pagan” the Roman church is.

I’m pretty sensitive to New Age mumbo-jumbo with a Christian gloss, and had this writer struck me as that sort of Christian, I would have picked up on it. Rather, she came across to me as someone with an acutely artistic sensitivity, and a passionate longing for communion with God in all her senses — a longing she communicates movingly, I thought. Here is a person who found holy joy in God’s grandeur. Her writing reminded me of the famous G.M. Hopkins poem:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

She captures some of this in her writing — and there her people were, beating the heck out of her for stepping outside their narrow theological boundaries. (What did old Hopkins know? He was a Jesuit priest, after all). I don’t know this writer, but the nature of the blows she took, and the extraordinary lack of charity with which they were struck, given the irenic qualities of her writing, made me upset on her behalf, and even moved to the point of tears. I thought: if the God of these stern and severe men were the only God I was ever shown, I doubt I would ever have become a Christian, because God would have seemed to me to be grim and gradgrinding.

I hesitated to post this, because I don’t want the thread below to become an opportunity to beat up on conservative Evangelicals, who almost never catch a break in our media. Besides, I assure you that you can find extremely rigid, legalistic Catholics and Orthodox. Plus, nearly all of us, no matter how broad our own convictions may be, have been harshly judgmental from time to time (in certain conditions, the self-consciously “non-judgmental” folks can be the most judgmental people you’ll ever see). And finally, I think the Christian world in our time and place faces a greater danger from a lack of theological rigor than its opposite.

All that said, this experience yesterday made me angry and discouraged, chiefly because what these well-meaning pastors are doing, whether they realize it or not, is anathematizing awe and wonder, which is the beginning of a living faith, and making people whose souls are drawn closer to their Creator through the experience of beauty ashamed of it. This experience made me more empathetic with people who have fallen away from the faith, or who have gone to the opposite liberal extreme within Christianity, because of bad experiences with this kind of thing. I wanted to post this to say that I now have more understanding of where Turmarion was coming from in the YEC argument in this space, given his direct experience in Appalachia with fundamentalist rigorism.

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108 Responses to Fundamentalism Vs. Wonder

I’m gonna guess that the critics of this lady’s book were of the Reformed sect. I admire much about Reformed theology, but I agree with you — their apparent suspicion of joy is quite nauseating. And I come from a Baptist background.

As far as experiencing God through secondary means, I distinctly remember once when I was in college (about seven or eight years ago) I decided for some reason that I wanted to wake up early and watch the sun rise. So, awake I did, at about 5 a.m. On seeing this sight for the first time in years, I was actually moved to tears. And worship for God was stirred within my heart as I witnessed the majestic work of His hands. I think the awe I felt at that moment was similar to what David felt when he wrote in Psalm 8:

“When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?”

The reason Reformed folks are so threatened by looking at God through secondary means is that they think those things will supplant God, Himself, in the hearts and minds of people. And they also fear that sound doctrine will be abandoned in favor of experiential sensationalism.

I know nothing of the particulars of this case (because you deliberately omitted them), but I think I know enough from what you wrote to name the problem: the heresy of iconoclasm. Psalm 19 seems to have been left out of their Bibles (The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork …).

In “Surprised By Joy”, C.S. Lewis related that his early fascination with the Norse gods gave him an appreciation of awe and wonder before he became a Christian. He said that if he did not have those early interests to form his religious emotions, he would not have been able to truly appreciate the “awesome” Christian God.

If you truly love and adore your wife, you will do the hard things she asks of you with a smile on your face, and it won’t seem like a burden. In fact, it will feel like a privilege, and you’ll be glad to have the opportunity to prove your love. If you’re scared of her because she’s a shrew, you’ll do just enough to keep her from yelling at you, and you’ll resent her the whole time.

When Jesus criticized the man who buried his talent in the ground (“I knew you were an angry and vengeful master”), I think this is what he was talking about. Christianity shouldn’t just be about “staying on God’s good side”. Real love is freer than that.

I can think of a hundred vitriolic things to say here, but if I learned anything from my time as a christian, it isthe value of magnanimity. Although I find the christian moral narrative a bit sophomoric, anyone who values the yes (at least) as much as the no is allright in my book.

I’d have a little more sympathy for your lament here if you weren’t so gifted at the art of directing similar invective against those he perceives as liberals. From the standpoint of someone internal to the Catholic/Orthodox world, I’m sure these kinds of distinctions (authentic mysticism versus syncretic emotionalism) are backed by a deep tradition and informed by quite a bit of study. But to someone outside that body of study, using a default set of “flags” to identify problematic teaching is a defensible heuristic, even if its not the one I’d use myself.

The issues concerning over-application of blanket heuristics arose during the debate over whether men should ever be preschool teachers that you started a few months back, and there you took the pro-heuristic side based on your own overriding anxiety about pedophilia. Well, other communities have overriding anxieties as well, and not all of them are entirely irrational.

You’ve done the same thing on theological issues internal to the Catholic and Orthodox world. There are any number of posts you make here that don’t demonstrate a charitable spirit, and would hardly qualify as irenic. Your invective against “Sister Stretchpants” over the weekend was brutally administered, and celebrated in the comments box. By the same token, I don’t think that it makes sense to bring Calvinists strongly to heel for their discomfort with emotional forms of spirituality, when that’s been such a widespread pathology of Protestantism in the last few centuries. Are there people out there experiencing “awe and wonder” over the limpid Catholic folk songs you like to mock, or over the New Age-y revisions of liturgy popular in the Protestant mainline world? Probably. People these days are all over the map, and there’s no accounting for taste. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you telling them they need to grow up, and learn to appreciate better worship music and liturgics.

Last week saw the release of a study comparing “intensity of faith” within Catholic and Protestant communities. Catholic intensity of faith has pretty much collapsed. Today, you’re very unlikely to see a forceful denunciation of much of anything within the Catholic lay world, on account of the fact that very few Catholics care much at all about Catholicism. So yes, I suspect I’d agree more with this unspecified author than with her critics, based on your description, but I’m still glad to be part of an extended ecclesiastical community which cares enough about good theology to believe it’s worth defending in public.

Also, on the matter of “narrow” versus “broad” communities: I’ve read many books from evangelical authors over my life expressing an appreciation for Catholic sacramental perspectives. Are there any Catholics (or Orthodox) out there who express a similar appreciation for evangelical perspectives on the meaning of sacraments (some evangelicals would prefer to say “rites”)? I’ve seen all kinds of negative views about how hollow and deficient Protestant perspectives are, mostly from online critics of the same time you found here, but virtually no positive ones. The evangelical world seems to me to be much more pluriform with respect to sacramental views than the Catholic world, which makes it hard for me to swallow the criticism that evangelicals are the ones who are more close-minded and exclusionary. (On a more tangible level, our communion tables are usually open to Catholics, but Catholic communion tables are always closed to us.) Perhaps there are good reasons for this, but they are grounded in the same sorts of abstract theological imperatives that you’re condemning just above.

“And finally, I think the Christian world in our time and place faces a greater danger from a lack of theological rigor than its opposite.”

Not only christianity… Paganism and syncretisms (like the ones here in Brazil) also suffer from lack of theology. And islam looks strong because the muslim world is an intelectual and economic backwater.

People have to organize their thoughts about God, faith and the Big Questions, and theology is the tool for this task.

“..anathematizing awe and wonder…”: awe and wonder are also needed for sincere scientific studies(while also dispised by arrogant scienticism that thinks it knows everything). Maybe the rejection of science and of awe and wonder for the Divine are correlated? I dont know.

While I agree with you fully that “the Christian world in our time and place faces a greater danger from a lack of theological rigor than its opposite,” and while I share your protective attitude toward fundamentalist Christians of this stripe, this reminds me a bit of the passage from Luke:

Woe unto you, lawyers! for you have taken away the key of knowledge: you entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in you hindered. Lk 11:52)

Here, of course, knowledge is not doctrine but a knowledge arising out of awe and wonder. To deny others a mode of coming to know God is precisely evil, even if it is well meaning and done out of zeal for truth.

On one hand, fundies are anti-intellectual populists: YEC, End Times, Palin, talk radio, Hagee, on and on. We read, on this blog and elsewhere, of those who have “swum the Tiber” because of Rome’s intellectual tradition. Fundie/evangelical worship can be too emotional — Rod himself has written of his suspiciousness of the emotionalism in Pentecostal (IIRC) services — and too tacky (I remember the post a while back of the intelligent, small-o orthodox Christian lamenting that he only seemed to have a choice between “conservative,” but tacky and stupid, churches, and “liberal” churches with rich liturgy and intelligent atmosphere but unacceptable theology.)

Now, OTOH, this post is saying that fundies are suspicious of emotion and joy, and are “dry and syllogistic,” compared to the mystery- and mysticism-accepting Catholic and Orthodox. So now fundies (or evangelicals more broadly), of all people, are too Spock-like?

I would like some clarification on the backgrounds of the critical fundamentalist pastors: Dispensationalist/Baptist/Pentecostal, Calvinist/”Dominionist”/Christian Reconstructionist, or some other faction; popular or academic; etc.?

I generally like your (to me) counter-intuitive take on religion and popular culture. But I will admit to frustration with your coddling of the fundamentalists when they do so much damage to individuals. It is not without reason that a cottage industry has grown up around recovering from fundamentalism. The hard core you speak of today, without that nice friendly gloss you have experienced is one of the big reasons religion is declining as a public influence, and not because it has all been exaggerated in the media. Real live people have been driven away from their communities and families because they cannot live up to the standard and there is no room for forgiveness.

I know and have family members who are evangelicals and fundamentalists who are less legalistic than the hard core, but if they are nice to me (the gay cousin) they have to keep it under wraps because their pastors will excommunicate them.

The spiritual abuse is real, and real people have been damaged by it. Your wife is correct. It is all about fear. They already live in the hell they fear so desperately.

[...]these well-meaning pastors are doing, whether they realize it or not, is anathematizing awe and wonder, which is the beginning of a living faith, and making people whose souls are drawn closer to their Creator through the experience of beauty ashamed of it.

The inverse of this is how I became Orthodox from being a Calvinist and something of a fundamentalist. Reading Plato taught me the importance of beauty. Reading the Fathers taught me it was essential to Christianity. The pursuit of beauty trod my Calvinism underfoot.

This sounds exactly like the uproar about 5-7 years ago involving Peter Enns and his book Incarnation and Inspiration. Enns had been a professor at a conservative evangelical seminary, and his book dared to challenge a purely literal view of the Bible. Just like you say about this author, his viewpoint would not have shocked a Catholic or Orthodox, but coming from where he was, it was labeled as heresy and he was removed from his position at seminary. His writing on this was actually really brilliant, but the amount of criticism he was the subject of was really astounding.

I have also noticed a tendency among Revivalist Protestants* to use “mysticism” as a slur word, as if anything that can’t be shoved into boxes measured by human reason is somehow heretical. It’s notable just how similar that attitude is to the attitude of the atheists to whom all religion period is “mystical” and therefore out of bounds.

* This is a term I have settled on to denote Evangelicals, Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, in place of “Fundangelical” (which is often used insultingly) and “right-wing Christian” which is too politically themed.

I was raised Southern Baptist and very involved in my church. Later on I taught Sunday School in a Lutheran church. Then I was exposed to fundamentalist evangelism about 19 years ago. At first it bewildered me. Continued exposure drove me away. It bears little resemblance in practice and sometimes even in doctrine to what I grew up with. I guess it’s working for them, but as they say I’m outta there.

I know the extreme is not the norm and there are both open and closed hearts everywhere. I don’t mean to beat up on anybody. But I find that some fundamental differences have bled over into just about every congregation except the new age mumbo jumbo with Christian gloss, and I don’t go there either. So, I go hiking instead.

What the writer experienced has been a long time in the making and I submit that it is more prevalent than might have been considered.

I have never met an artistic person reared in a fundamentalist church who continued to worship there as an adult. If one is gifted with talent in the arts, one hears the beauty and transcendence of the arts derided at every turn. Imagine what that does to young person whose calling is to be an artist, or a musician, or God forbid, a dancer.

Rather, “Christianity” is taught as a grim test of blinkered rule-keeping, devoid of even the acknowledgement of the pleasures of a sunset, the beauty of a Rembrandt, or God’s presence in much of the music of JS Bach. Any hint of wonder and awe are snuffed out as pagan mysticism, or worse, papist.

Thanks for addressing this in a respectful way, Rod. I’ve always been an orthodox Protestant in the Reformed tradition, sometimes lumped into the “Evangelical” category. I remember an episode when I was in law school and was a member of the Christian Law Students Society. During our weekly meeting, we went around the room and described something for which we thanked God. Each of the other members told some personal story of depravity (drugs, sex, violence, witchcraft) and how God had delivered them from that. After each such vignette, there was an emphatic chorus of “Amens” and such. But when it was my turn to share, I instead talked about what I had experienced while riding my bicycle to campus that day. I waxed somewhat eloquent about the sun breaking through the trees, the sounds of birds, the trillium flowers that had just bloomed in the woods, the feel of the wind on my face, and how all that was such a gift from our Creator. When I finished, there was dead silence and blank stares all around. They simply couldn’t process my type of “testimony.” It didn’t fit the model they were accustomed to.

In the years since, orthodox Protestants with a more holistic appreciation for Creation, the arts, food, music and the fullness of life in general have become more bold. Richard Foster (Evangelical Quaker) for example, and his books on the spiritual disciplines. The return to the Celtic roots of our Reformed tradition. The renewed attention to C.S. Lewis’ science fiction trilogy. Thank God for all that.

Rod,
Thanks for your thoughtful remarks. The lack of charity expressed in disagreements among conservative Protestants is heartbreaking. The treatment of evangelicals with a quirky take on things by self appointed gatekeepers is appalling. Examples of those treated quite shabbily include Peter Enns, the Biologos group, Misty Irons, and N.T. Wright to name just a few off the top of mt head. It is fine to disagree pointedly with these writers, but we should be able to do so graciously. The fact that we don’t is to our shame and we should be called on it. Conservative Protestants stand at an interesting crossroads. I suspect fear and a decided lack of confidence drive much of this…it is unfortunate.

On a brighter note, if you are interested in a reformed/evangelical engagement with the sacraments, I can’t recommend Len Vander Zee’s “Christ, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper” highly enough.

You’ve done the same thing on theological issues internal to the Catholic and Orthodox world. There are any number of posts you make here that don’t demonstrate a charitable spirit, and would hardly qualify as irenic. Your invective against “Sister Stretchpants” over the weekend was brutally administered, and celebrated in the comments box. By the same token, I don’t think that it makes sense to bring Calvinists strongly to heel for their discomfort with emotional forms of spirituality, when that’s been such a widespread pathology of Protestantism in the last few centuries.

Couple of things here. I’ve deliberately not mentioned this writer’s name or the name of her book, only because I was surprised by how emotional I got over the intense condemnation of it from the various reviewers I read. I don’t want to post speculation about her identity, not because I’m trying to hide anything — the criticism was all in public — but because I feel strangely protective of this person I don’t even know. I don’t want my comboxes to turn into a place where people trash her work, and anyway, her identity is beside the point I’m trying to make in this post.

Anyway, let me clarify that not all these critics were Calvinists, as far as I can tell. And I don’t begrudge them objecting to what they see as heresies, or at least serious flaws in the book. I can’t fault them for failing to be Catholic or Orthodox. What got to me, though, was the content of their criticism. The writer expressed a profound respect for God’s creation, and wrote about how rejoicing in the gift of Creation, and in the presence of beauty, brought her closer to Him. You would have thought that she danced around a golden calf at the foot of Sinai. The thing that was so jarring to me was how harsh the judgment was, relative to her supposed offense.

Aside from this writer and her book, the vision these theologians/pastors/reviewers have of art, architecture, and the divine is something I find tremendously impoverishing. It reminds me of Wahhabism, to be honest. Not that the Southern Reformed Baptist Calvary Bible Church is the same thing as a Wahhabi mosque, for heaven’s sake, but I sense a parallel in the fear of idol worship taken to an extreme.

I’ve tried my best in this blog post, Edward, to express respect for these very conservative Protestants. I know well that not all Protestants hold these views, and I also know well that those who do are in many ways much better Christians than I am. Still, I was taken aback by how bad they beat up this writer, who is from their church tradition, and what that says about the way men or women within those churches who do have an artistic or sacramental sensibility may be taught, treated, or made to feel ashamed or even unholy because of it.

“If one is gifted with talent in the arts, one hears the beauty and transcendence of the arts derided at every turn. Imagine what that does to young person whose calling is to be an artist, or a musician, or God forbid, a dancer.”

Apart from some musicians, you’re sadly right, Mike Nichols – and God help you if you’re into related fields such as media, journalism and/or communications like me!

Rod, have you read anything by Marilynne Robinson? She’s a Calvinist, but she’s much more celebratory of beauty, art, etc. than other (stereotypical?) ones – I think you might like her.

This is very much the religion I grew up with: a syllogistic approach to theology, a legalistic approach to personal behavior, punctuated by brief, wrenching moments of spiritual ecstasy or agony (often difficult to tell the difference). In this world, too often the arts are seen in purely instrumentalist ways, and there is often little conception of the value of reveling in beauty simply because our creator revels in beauty. Even the more progressive elements in these groups who recognize the intrinsic value of the arts too often erect a wall between the poetic view of the world and their theology, which cannot admit of any ambigty or uncertainty.

I am now a traditionalist Anglican, but I see the same tendencies creeping into our churches, and it bothers me. There’s something cramped about the American Protestant mind, and I don’t know that there’s any cure.

My favorite poet, the Scot Edwin Muir, grew up under a severe Calvinism. He fell away from the faith and later returned, in a very private way, in later adulthood. Much of his poetry is incarnational in a radical way that I’ve found so helpful in my own journey. I love this one in particular, which gets at the horror of this overly rationalistic theology..

The Incarnate One

The windless northern surge, the sea-gull’s scream,
And Calvin’s kirk crowning the barren brae.
I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd’s dream,
Christ, man and creature in their inner day.
How could our race betray
The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake
Who chose this form and fashion for our sake?

The Word made flesh here is made word again
A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.
See there King Calvin with his iron pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and bent
Into an ideological argument.

There’s better gospel in man’s natural tongue,
And truer sight was theirs outside the Law
Who saw the far side of the Cross among
The archaic peoples in their ancient awe,
In ignorant wonder saw
The wooden cross-tree on the bare hillside,
Not knowing that there a God suffered and died.

The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down,
Pagan and Christian man alike will fall,
The auguries say, the white and black and brown,
The merry and the sad, theorist, lover, all
Invisibly will fall:
Abstract calamity, save for those who can
Build their cold empire on the abstract man.

A soft breeze stirs and all my thoughts are blown
Far out to sea and lost. Yet I know well
The bloodless word will battle for its own
Invisibly in brain and nerve and cell.
The generations tell
Their personal tale: the One has far to go
Past the mirages and the murdering snow.

because what these well-meaning pastors are doing, whether they realize it or not, is anathematizing awe and wonder, which is the beginning of a living faith, and making people whose souls are drawn closer to their Creator through the experience of beauty ashamed of it.

Well said. Dogma and doctrine are all a matter of shoving God into boxes measured by human reason, and God will not be contained. Icons can be idolatry or heresy too. The ultimate question is whether one is admiring an independent power, or the beauty with which it was created.

Anyone chanting about “the heresy of…” is committing heresy, by themselves fostering factions within the faith by insisting that their own limited understanding is the sum total of what God has to offer.

Edward, to put it another way, these reviews of the writer’s book struck me as doing surgery with an ax blade. Again, I allow for the fact that they might have had solid theological grounds for criticizing her work — I honestly don’t know, not being from within that tradition — but they went about it with such overwhelming force that they smashed the thing. Maybe there was no way, from that theological perspective, to salvage anything from this particular book. If so, boy, what an incredibly narrow and grim theological perspective.

I think Rod’s done a very good job at being respectful and at the same time showing how disgusted he is. And from the tone of what he’s saying these Calvinist writers said, I don’t blame him. I’ve dealt with some of them before, as well as some Assemblies of God folks. It’s not that they’re all anti-Beauty, Wahhabi-types; it’s just that those types are the loudest of the bunch and they get most of the attention. Like a squeaky wheel on a bike…

“If so, boy, what an incredibly narrow and grim theological perspective.” I used to self-identify as conservative Reformed. Yes it is narrow, yes it is grim. Thank God for the new perspectives I have discovered.

As someone who spent time in a range of churches (from Anglican to Pentecostal), I appreciate your trying to be fair here. I think it’s worth remembering that within any Christian tradition there are those who try to replace salvation by faith with salvation by belief .

A significant contributor to the mindset you rightly disparage, in my experience, is an uneasiness with the Holy Spirit as fully God and fully present. This was especially the case with Dispensational theology, which I’ve heard characterized as having a trinity of “Father, Son and Holy Scripture”. But this discomfort has to be understood in the context of what is attractive to some folks about that kind of fundamentalism, namely an ordered universe which is *safe* for them and their children if they play by the rules. And for some people, those rules, even if they functionally replace God in their lives, are what helps them hold life together. So they, and their pastors, are ruthless in stamping out those who dare to suggest that there might be alternatives to their view of God and the universe. It’s not just an intellectual argument to them.

I grew up Catholic, but spent enough of those years in the Bible belt to hear and respond to the clarion call for repentance and salvation which is the special mark of Evangelical Christianity. (It is also, not coincidentally, the mark of the more conservative strains of Islam, the other “expeditionary” Abrahamic faith.) That call is an important one in all varieties of orthodox Christianity. We cannot be saved without turning aside from the natural and easy path. The fact that Evangelicism focuses so much on this transformative experience and Jesus’ central role in this, is its strength, a strength other varieties of Christianity can really learn from.

However, I’ve come to see over time that focusing solely on the first initial experience of conversion is not sufficient. We aren’t just to meant to be re-born. We are to grow in faith and strength, and that’s where the old disciplines of prayer and contemplation and self denial and mysticism come in. It’s true that you can go too far in mysticism and lose sight of orthodoxy. But it’s also true that you can’t freeze frame your born-again moment for the rest of your life. You have to continue down the path, once you’ve found it. And mystery and contemplation are two time-honored traditions on that path. Wonder and awe at nature are hardly alien to the faith. Read the Psalms, slowly and reflectively, and you’ll see it reflected there.

I’ve seen these arguments and criticisms online as well. There’s a split in the Evangelical community between (often younger) people who are rediscovering contemplation and sacrament and finding great renewal in it, and people who see all of that as New Age or Popery. Just today I came across this nice long diatribe against Liberty University for daring to present in one of its theology electives material on “the spiritual disciplines, the prayer life, and the biblical nature of calling, ministry and character.” The website concluded that Liberty University was no longer orthodox.

It remains to be seen which side wins this argument. Rejecting centuries of rediscovered Christian traditions will likely not end well for Evangelical Christianity. Especially not if the younger rediscoverers ship out for other ports rather than staying put and trying to reform their own churches.

Rod: My point is that it’s often the case when I see conservative Protestants talked about in the media, I see a caricature that I know to be untrue, and I naturally want to push back against that. This is why I felt obliged recently to defend Marco Rubio and the Young Earth Creationist crowd, even though I believe they are quite wrong on the science, and on what ought to be taught in schools.

Thank you for finally admitting it was a tribal response (though you might prefer another term). It’s true that the media often give conservative Protestants the short end of the stick; but your reaction shows how different our temperaments are, I guess. If a group I liked or sympathized with was pushing something as crazy as YEC, I would be angered exactly because it would be the precise kind of thing that feeds such stereotypes in the first place. I’d tend to attack my own side more vigorously and passionately in the same way that I’d be more concerned about questionable behavior on the part of my child than that of someone else’s child. I give less slack to the sides I belong to, sympathize with, or broadly like, at least when it comes to goofiness or things I think are unacceptable.

Anyway, listen to your wife on this! She knows what she’s talking about.

pinkjohn: But I will admit to frustration with your coddling of the fundamentalists when they do so much damage to individuals. It is not without reason that a cottage industry has grown up around recovering from fundamentalism. The hard core you speak of today, without that nice friendly gloss you have experienced is one of the big reasons religion is declining as a public influence, and not because it has all been exaggerated in the media. Real live people have been driven away from their communities and families because they cannot live up to the standard and there is no room for forgiveness.

This!!! I’ve taught all my professional life, and have lots of experience with teens and twenty-somethings, to say nothing of living in the Bible Belt, and this is very much true. There are reasons the “Nones” are increasing, and while it’s not all the fault of churches, a lot of it is, as described here.

Mike Nichols’s statement also resonates with me. Though my training is in math and the sciences, I have always had a strong arty side. I wasn’t raised Revivalist Protestant (in JonF’s felicitous phrasing), but that was the environment in which I grew up. Given that I had affinities to science and art, it’s no wonder I was never drawn to Revivalist Protestantism.

Much of the criticism probably also arose from the fact that it was a woman writing well about spirituality. Many (although not all) of the traditions you are talking about look poorly on women speaking on faith. Your description does NOT sound like the work of Rachel Held Evans (and I’m not trying to get you to confirm or deny her identity), but she is someone who writes well, and publicly, about her faith journey and struggles with Christianity and her place in it. She gets all kinds of cr*p around the internet, largely due to the fact of being female.

Rod – Great post, and I think your analysis is spot on. (I grew up in a church that taught the basic theological views of the Left Behind books but was much more conservative than Lahaye and Jenkins, so I know what I’m talking about when it comes to crazy fundies.) That said, I think it’s hard for people outside Protestantism to appreciate how insane the past 120 years have been for us. Go read the New Yorker story about Rob Bell and read some of the positions that are being endorsed in that piece by ostensibly Christian Protestants. “The resurrection isn’t meant to be taken literally”? Seriously? It’s horrifying, but that’s what many Protestants over the past century have believed and taught. So the (over)reaction of many conservative Protestants has been to want to nail down every jot and tittle into perfectly clear doctrinal positions that leave no room whatsoever for mystery.

In a way, it reminds me of the difficulty conservatives who care about the environment have when they’re talking to other conservatives. The well has been so thoroughly poisoned at this point that nothing we say can be taken at face value, all of it is just sneaking in some backdoor progressivist agenda. To some conservatives, simply expressing an interest in conserving the environment is proof that you’re a RINO. I think the same thing happens with Protestants. Certain language has been abused so thoroughly by heretical or heterodox protestants that at this point there are many conservative protestants who cannot hear certain language or phrasing without attacking the person using it, even if their meaning is actually perfectly acceptable within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. (By the way, for what this is worth, I say all of the above as a convinced calvinist who attends a conservative Presbyterian congregation. We’re not all haters of mystery and beauty, some of us actually have found that calvinistic theology makes the world more beautiful.)

Rod: “…to find so many articulate, educated Protestant pastors and writer cutting loose on her as if she were some sort of New Age crystal guru.”

It would be helpful, Rod, if you explained exactly who they are who are “cutting loose”. Can you name some actual names?

I already know there is an upsurge of “discernment bloggers” on the Internet. They have been around for several years now, and their numbers are steadily increasing. Sadly enough, many of them are complete lunatics, in my opinion. I would have expected one of them to pour barrels of vitriol down on the writer, whoever she is.

In fact, you practically cannot google on any xtian writer of note, or any xtian public figure for that matter, dead or alive, and not have your search results get bloated by the inclusion of all the stuff the “discernment bloggers” out there have written attacking that person. The problem has gotten so bad lately that when I am researching certain topics I have to include a slew of “minus” keywords to exclude all that junk.

Re: The writer expressed a profound respect for God’s creation, and wrote about how rejoicing in the gift of Creation, and in the presence of beauty, brought her closer to Him. You would have thought that she danced around a golden calf at the foot of Sinai. The thing that was so jarring to me was how harsh the judgment was, relative to her supposed offense.

Do her critics have the 104th Psalm in their Bibles? It celebrates God’s creation (“How wondrous they works O Lord; in wisdom hath thou made them all”). We open Vespers with that psalm.

I did some googling and discovered this woman and her critics. The latter do not surprise me, since much of their theology is driven by a univocal understanding of divine action. So, for example, when this writer says she sees God in other people’s faces, nature, etc., her critics think she is actually claiming a sort of pantheism or panentheism. In fact, her view of God was the one embraced by virtually theists–Christians, Jews, and Muslims–until recently. And the irony is that her critics–who claim to be champions of Christian orthodoxy–actually hold a view of divine action that diminishes God, as if he were merely one being among many rather than ground of being itself.

This is why many of her critics come from religious groups that are enthusiastic about intelligent design and other views that try to discover places in nature for God to act. But in classical theism–because God’s actions are viewed analogically and his being participatory–there is no need to find room for God. For God is not that kind of being. Because he is the ground of being, his causal powers are always active in sustaining and keeping all contingent being in existence.

What her critics have accepted is essentially the modern project, and thus they are threatened by any understanding of God’s presence that does not impinge, disrupt, or replace autonomous nature. They are defenders, not of Christianity, but the domesticated, modernist, understanding of “Christianity.”

Good comments here. Let me reiterate that none of the critics I’ve read of this writer’s work are Calvinists; I just went back to do some research on them, and they’re all non-denominational, Bible-church style Protestants. I said in my post that they reminded me of the Calvinist congregation in that film.

There may be Calvinist critics of this woman’s writing, but I have not run across them.

I’m sorry, but I’d rather not name names. Since posting this, I’ve heard privately from several readers — some Evangelical, others ex-Evangelical — who say this is not at all surprising, that this kind of thing is common in their communities.

Jake, I think your comparison to how difficult it is to talk about environmental conversation among political conservatives without engendering a freakout is apt. I had this problem with Crunchy Cons. A non-trivial number of conservatives simply could not accept anything I was saying, and for reasons that I never really understood. It was like they felt that if they gave in on any one point, the whole ideological framework that allowed them to make sense of the world would collapse.

But it isn’t. How can someone assess if the criticisms were warranted without knowing what she said? I think in your effort to avoid generic evangelical bashing you have actually encouraged it because the specifics here can not be assessed. There is only some vague tendency to be derided.

I don’t want to defend people when I don’t know who they are or who they are criticizing. But it’s always a good idea to be cautious about judging an intra-family squabble. Sometimes there is information that outsiders don’t see that affects the perspective. It’s like when non-Catholics were wondering why people were being so harsh on that lovely man, Fr. Marciel.

Of course I could just be sensitive to the issue since I myself have been criticized for not appreciating the “artistic sensitivity” of the post-evangelicals who are rejecting the Word of God for whatever happens to be faddish among the cool kids.

A prime example is Rachel Held Evans. As one of your commenters said, “She gets all kinds of cr*p around the internet, largely due to the fact of being female.” That, of course, is nonsense. RHE is leading people astray about Scripture, but when I point that out it means that I’m an evil old white male misogynist rather than someone concerned about orthodoxy.

We saw the same thing with the Rob Bell controversy. Outsiders couldn’t figure out why we Calvinists were so harsh on him when he seemed to be trying to make Christianity more palatable for hipsters. For too many people, it’s okay if someone is leading folks down the road to hell as long as they are waxing rhapsodic about the beauty of the trees and birds along the way.

It was like they felt that if they gave in on any one point, the whole ideological framework that allowed them to make sense of the world would collapse.

Not coincidentally, this is the same basic reason that fundamentalists cling to such absurdities as young-earth creationism like grim death… if the world wasn’treally created in 6, 24-hour literal days, 6000 years ago like the Bible says, then why believe anything else in the Bible is actually, really true?

There’s a certain, constant segment of the human population that just cannot process or accept any sort of ambiguity or uncertainty, be it in religion, politics, economics, science, whatever. If they don’t become fundamentalist Christians, they become followers of militant atheistm, or Ayn Rand Objectivism or neo-Maoism, or whatever ideology promises to have ALL the answers, for ALL TIME.

This kind of ties into your “Southernness” post. I’m a Midwestern transplant to the Dallas area. There’s much to like here, but I’m rather nauseated by the positively paranoid and irrationally hypermasculine aspects of the subcultures here that are heavily identified by their religiousity. Southern Baptists come to mind, but they are relatively mild compared to Independent Fundamental Baptists. I occasionally listen to the “American Family Radio” station here for ironic hathos fun, since it is just a few decimal places form the NPR station. It’s not tied to a particular denomination as far as I know, just a near pitch perfect parody of political golden calf-worshiping Fundagelicalism. This evening, it was David Barton prattling on about how America is well on its way to becoming a Marxist nation, just as predicted by the Communist Party-USA. And this is a guy who has disproportionate influence on the Texas Board of Education’s text book purchasing decisions. Your Working Boy has more:http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/david-barton-christianizing-history/

It is a mistake to think this sort of mentally unbalanced response is confined to the bible thumpers. You will find it from any group that finds their orthodoxy being undermined. When my first book came out I had New Agers and Pagans chewing the carpet in their rage.

(On the other hand, being called an Agent of the Anti-Christ by a televangelist sort of was icing on the cake..)

“It was like they felt that if they gave in on any one point, the whole ideological framework that allowed them to make sense of the world would collapse”.

Exactly- because for them it would. I find such a fragile, brittle faith sad. But it’s important to remember
1. That such faith isn’t limited to fundamentalist conservatives.
2. That the charitable response to a brittle faith isn’t to pick up a hammer and smash it- tempting as it might be!

I know you’re not naming names, but I’m going to go way out on a limb here (OK, it’s a short limb given what you’re describing) and guess you read Ann Voskamp’s book. If that’s not the book you read, you should go read it any ways. And yes, this sort of thing is common. Another writer I know recently described it as “the goats bleating” so they can be properly sorted and I have to say I agree.

The fact that it was written by a woman also accounts for how the freak-out. The male priesthood of RCC and EOC aren’t anything like their protestant counterparts who reject women in ministry. I think that the RCC and EOC are in grave error regarding the ordination of women what with the female disciples and apostles Paul praised. But Protestant “complimentarians” take things to a whole other level. While in the Catholic churches (at least in my experience) the teaching is that the priesthood is reserved for men, in complimentarian circles leadership, authority and often teaching is something women are unfit for – at least when it comes to women. It’s a much harsher and more totalitarian ethos than anything I ever encountered in Catholic circles. If you think the treatment of this woman was bad, you should look up the reviews of Rachel Held Evan’s recent book on “biblical womanhood”. Curse words such as you would strike a man for saying to a woman’s face were used by men claiming to stand up for the bible, God and the Christian faith. Really vile stuff in response to a book which by all reasonable accounts was sincere, good humored, respectful and insightful. But that’s par for the course for the goats, I suppose. Add in the fact that both Voskamp and Held-Evens are lay people without so much as an MDiv and you have women who have stepped waaaaaay outside their bounds.

I have to agree that I think you do underestimate the damage that this sort of stuff does. I’m not sure if anyone’s looked at the background of the “nones”, but to the extent that they were raised in conservative, protestant, semi or full-on fundamentalist backgrounds, walking away from the faith may well have been the most spiritually appropriate response for them. It takes a strong person to stand up to this sort of thing.

Sorry – as always, I need an editor. I meant to say “in complimentarian circles leadership, authority and often teaching are things women are unfit for – at least when it comes to RELIGION.”
I’ll leave the other errors unchecked under the assumption that y’all get the gist. Smart people ’round here and all. ;p

Not knowing any of the particulars of this case, I will not comment. But a word with regard to the shots at Calvinists: enough already. The idea that Calvinism engenders hostility toward beauty or mystery is a joke. Seventeenth century Dutch Calvinism was not exactly lacking for artists. The Geneva psalter is filled with wonder and awe for God’s creation. And for all the bad press that the Puritans get, they sure did reflect a good deal on joy and gratitude.

Obviously there are counter examples. But the cheap shots are no more helpful than the gross exaggerations and distortions that too many prots aim at Roman Catholics.

As a matter of fact, within protestantism your Calvinist is more likely to share a drink or smoke and indulge in high culture than most.

[Note from Rod: Would you please recognize that none of the critics I read are Calvinists! I keep saying that! I only mentioned Calvinists as portrayed in a film, and with them it wasn't about hating beauty, it was about mystery. -- RD]

I apologize if any of that was a too harsh. It’s very difficult to offer criticize of something that’s being described in only an indirect way. And I was certainly confused by the stray reference to Calvinism, which apparently was only intended as an analogy, rather than a hint as to the nature of this particular controversy. I was also a bit confused by “sacramental”, which I think Rod just meant to refer to finding God’s activity in nature, rather than anything specifically related to the formal Catholic sacraments (though there are many assertions that the two are correlated, a point with some validity but often overplayed).

I have a fair amount of background with both Calvinist (Reformed) and classical Dispensationalist (Plymouth Brethren) congregations. While I’m not currently attending either type of church, and have moved on in my thinking in many ways, I still have an amicable (perhaps overly nostalgic) view of both types of communities. I’ve moved toward a more “sacramental” form of Christianity, attending an Anglican church for the last two years, but somehow I’ve done it without developing any narrative of disdain toward my own past.

In particular, I felt plenty of “awe and wonder” growing up in a very austere Brethren church, with little ornamentation and heavy focus on the primacy of Scripture to the exclusion of other sources of authority or spiritual expression. I feel galled by stereotypes about how members of that kind of church are dour Puritans who despise joy and happiness, and want everyone to be gloomy as they solemnly intone passages from the KJV. That never matched my own experience growing up. If anything, I have a residual tendency to experience awe when attending the sort of churches that embody that aesthetic, complete with KJV readings.

I also think that Francis Beckwith is being horribly unfair in claiming that anyone enthusiastic about intelligent design is thereby incapable of appreciating the broader sovereignty of God’s activity in the natural world, to sustain laws and cosmic order. I don’t see this particular debate as inviting that kind of dichotomy by necessity of argument, even if it might emerge in a few cases sociologically. In fact, most of the folks I know who think God is active in special or supernatural ways also appreciate the instructive beauty of the natural world, and thank God for it. I can remember hearing any number of popular devotionals to that extent in my youth. I never noticed the sort of deficiency that he apparently thinks is endemic.

I’m still relatively agnostic about what aspects of nature might be uniquely ascribed to supernatural agency (human consciousness? the initial creation of life?), but I have no conceptual problem with praising God equally for both exceptional/miraculous and conventional manifestations of God’s power in nature, for reasons that I very much credit to my upbringing in extremely non-sacramental churches. I certainly don’t think there’s some imperative to denying acts of special creation in order to respect the natural world more. It’s no different than believing that some people recover from sickness by virtue of miraculous healing, some recover due to the skill of doctors, and that both of those mechanisms are cause for gratitude toward God.

In fact, I fail to recognize those caricatures so often that I wonder if I just grew up in an unusual environment, surrounded by fundamentalists who were just uniquely artistic, creative, or quirky. That seems to violate the Copernican principle of assuming that there was nothing exceptional about my childhood, but it’s not inconceivable. But for whatever reason, I grow weary of constantly being told that someone else’s Christianity is deeper than mine, for reasons that don’t seem validated by any of my own experiences in those Christian communities that are being critiqued. I most assuredly do not resonate with the many voices above who want to write off all those communities as “fearful” or “grim” and use them out as whipping boys in perpetuity.

I’ve been searching for a place where I could have reasonable discussions with conservatives, and this looks like I may have stumbled onto one. This topic is also a good place to start.

First, this notion of a “liberal media” villifying Christians seems ridiculous to me. I grew up a stone’s throw from Pat Robertson’s university, and it wasn’t the liberal media that made him and his ilk, e.g. Jerry Falwell, Ted Haggard, popular, it was evangelical Christians. When they make themselves popular figures and then come out and say things like Katrina was God punishing New Orleans, what do you expect the media to do? I’m surprised that the media doesn’t make more out of the lack of comments when tragedy hits places like Alabama. What was their God thinking then?

But I do have some empathy for what the author feels. As a black man, it riles me no end that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton get trotted out whenever some injustice is done to a black person as if they represent the black community. They don’t: most of us have little or no respect for these guys.

But the biggest issue I have with this blog and the comments is its implicit premise – that evolution and and creationism are mutual exclusive. They only are if you take the Bible literarally and that science subdues your awe of nature.

In particular, the comment from someone that woke up at sunrise and was so astounded by the beauty that that made them belive in a Christian God? Why Christian? Can’t you just see the beauty and realize that there is something pout these that we don’t understand? It seems to me to share the height of hubris to be so sure that your view of the creation of this beauty is literally in a book written by mere mortals.

And by “share the height of hubris” I am referring to scientists who belive that science can explain everything and it is direct opposition to faith. My wife and I are both scientists in related but diffrent fields, and the more we learn, the more we are in awe of nature. We can be reductionist as can be, but its clear to us that there is something beyond our understanding that is behind what we study. And I think any scientist that thinks otherwise is arrogant to a fault.

My wife and I read the New Jerusalem Bible and were struck by Genesis 1:24 in this version:

“24 God said, ‘Let the earth produce every kind of living creature in its own species: cattle, creeping things and wild animals of all kinds.’ And so it was.”

“Let the Earth create…”

Sounds like evolution to me.

[Note from Rod: Michael, thanks for your good comment. I'm going to go ahead and publish it, but please, let's not turn this thread into another go-around about evolution, which we had last week. If you search this site for "Marco Rubio" and "YEC," you'll get all you can possibly stand! -- RD]